Colonialism and Postcolonialism

POSTCOLONIAL CINEMA WORLDWIDE

Just as there is a great degree of continuity both economically and
culturally between the colonial and postcolonial periods, so have certain
industrial precedents and representational conventions persisted, even in
the wake of the myriad decolonization struggles and countercultural
political movements of the mid- and late-twentieth century. First,
Hollywood's domination of the international film market, the
origins of which can be traced to World War I, became more pronounced
after 1947, when India's achievement of independence set the
postcolonial era in motion. As a result, contemporary American
blockbusters can be assured a captive audience in all corners of the
globe. Yet even in the face of such competition, which limits severely the
number of screens, both domestic and international, available to directors
working in other national (or transnational) contexts, many alternatives
to Hollywood exist; in fact, such alternatives seem increasingly more
viable given the proliferation of digital technologies that greatly reduce
the costs of film production; film festivals and specialty television
networks, which supplement traditional exhibition venues; and
international co-productions, which allow for input, both financial and
aesthetic, from a variety of sources.

Second, while films made in the postcolonial era are typically critical of
colonialism to varying degrees, they also quite frequently bear traces of
a colonial legacy insofar as they capitulate to certain imperialist tropes
and racialized fantasies. For example, since the 1950s the native of
ethnographic cinema has become an object of idealization and yearning more
than derision and aggression; at the same time, however, the tendency to
relegate indigenous cultures to a temporal space outside of history and/or
a textual space outside of narrative persists. A most instructive case in
point is
Walkabout
(1971) by Nicolas Roeg (b. 1928), an Australian film by a British
director that features a teenaged girl and her little brother who,
stranded in the outback, meet an Aboriginal boy in the midst of a
walkabout. While the film romanticizes the native boy, offering up his way
of life as preferable to the mechanized, gray, and urban existence of its
white characters, its trailer makes clear to what extent it is nonetheless
invested in a racist model

of evolutionary progress when the story is summarized via voice-over:
"The Aborigine and the girl—30,000 years
apart—together." A concomitant cinematic trend in the
postcolonial era has been the representation of the imperialist past in
epic films suffused with colonial nostalgia and dedicated, at least in
part, to the restitution of colonialism's reputation. Commenting on
this trend in 1984, Salman Rushdie described a spate of British
productions, including
A Passage to India
(David Lean, 1984) and
Gandhi
(Richard Attenborough, 1984), as "the phantom twitchings of an
amputated limb" (p. 92). In many late twentieth-century films that
met with overwhelming critical and popular success, the tendency to
romanticize the native and to offer up a kinder, gentler version of
colonialism worked in tandem. For example, it is precisely their
association with a colonized culture that is closer to nature and thus
less corrupted and inhibited than that of their white counterparts that
redeems certain white characters as well as the colonizing culture with
which they are associated in
Out of Africa
(Sydney Pollack, 1985),
Indochine
(
Indochina
, Régis Wargnier, 1992), and
The Piano
(Jane Campion, 1993).

Indeed, film plays a significant role in neocolonialism just as it did in
colonialism decades ago; at the same time, however, the postcolonial era
has produced many powerful films, filmmakers, national cinemas, and film
movements, which creatively confront the past, ponder the present, and
give voice to perspectives that are under-represented in the cinema
discussed thus far. A pivotal film in this regard is
La Battaglia di Algeria
(
The Battle of Algiers
, 1965), a film about the Algerian War (1954–1962) by Italian
director Gillo Pontecorvo (b. 1919). While the film is remarkable for its
even-handed approach to the conflict, its gritty realist aesthetic, and
its representation of women as active revolutionaries, what is most
striking is how singular it was at the time of its release. Despite the
fact that a large percentage of the French population did not support the
response of its government to Algerian insurgency, films made in France
during the conflict did not prove a site of significant dissent or
critique. Only the occasional film even acknowledged the war by making
oblique reference to it, and the one film that did attempt to represent
the event directly in order to explore the amorality of torture,
Le Petit soldat
(
The Little Soldier
, Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), was banned from French screens for several
years. It took an outsider to provide a frank account of the watershed
events that ultimately led to Algeria's political autonomy and thus
to produce what has come to be regarded, despite the number of subsequent
films with the same narrative agenda, as the definitive anticolonial film.

The Battle of Algiers
is an exemplary representation of resistance made in the postcolonial
era, but equally revolutionary are the many resistant representations that
have been produced by "Third," "Fourth," and
"First" World filmmakers alike during the later half of the
twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first. These representations
are extremely varied in form, encompassing everything from the
"aesthetics of hunger" promoted by the Brazilian Cinema Novo
movement in the 1960s to the high production values and lavish spectacles
of Bollywood musicals, from the Brechtian-infused realism of Ousmane
Sembene (b. 1923; Senegal) and Cheick Oumar Sissoko (b. 1945; Mali) to the
genre defying experimentation of Trinh T. Minh-ha Trinh (b. 1953;
Vietnamese American), and Tracey Moffatt (b. 1960; Australian Aboriginal).
Furthermore, these filmmakers examine a wide array of subjects. While
films like
Como Era Gostoso Meu Francêes
(
How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman
, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971) and
Surviving Columbus
(George Burdeau, 1990) engage with the colonial past by revisiting its
primal scene in order to rewrite the "discovery" narrative,
others do so by focusing on the possibilities and pitfalls that emerge in
its aftermath, such as
Chinese Box
(Wayne Wang, 1997). Still others, particularly the output of Fourth World
filmmakers, reveal a colonial present that often escapes notice, such as
in
Once Were Warriors
(Lee Tamahori, 1994).

It is impossible to account for the diversity of postcolonial cinema in
short form. Nonetheless, as varied as these resistant representations are,
one quality unites them: the potential to provide an experience contrary
to that described by Franz Fanon (1925–1961) in his book
Black Skin, White Masks
(1967). Explaining the means by which imperialism impacts the
psychological as well as the political life of the colonized in Africa,
thereby producing a society of self-alienated subjects, he offers the
example of a black schoolboy who, upon attending a Tarzan film with his
friends, readily identifies with the only character whom both colonial
society at large and that text in particular empower: the white hero. In
other words, what these films have in common is an investment in a
diversity of celluloid heroes and a propensity to imbue with depth
characters that have historically been rendered in superficial fashion.
They create a vision at odds with that reproduced in and through the type
of dominant cinema that Fanon invoked and that allowed for the emergence
of what Robert Stam and Ella Shohat define as "polycentric
multiculturalism," a political ideal wherein "no single
community or part of the world, whatever its economic or political power,
should be epistemologically privileged" (
Unthinking Eurocentricism
, p.48).